# Marcus Delgado, VP of Sales Operations at Ridgeline Advisory Group — read of Inbound Intent Signal Router AI, May 30, 2026 > "11 years in sales ops, currently managing lead flow for 14 account execs across four regional territories at a 90-person management consulting firm in Chicago." --- ## How I got here I have a standing Tuesday habit: coffee, commute, and one Google search about whatever ops problem is annoying me that week. This week it was "inbound lead routing software consulting firms" because we keep losing M&A inquiries to a shared Gmail inbox that nobody owns. A blog post about LeanData alternatives had a comment section. Someone dropped this URL. I opened it on the Metra. ## What I clicked first The headline did something right: "Stop letting inbound leads sit in a queue." That is a sentence a human ops person wrote. I've used that exact phrasing in a slide deck to my CEO. I kept reading. Then: "Route to the right person in under 60 seconds." Okay. I want to know what "under 60 seconds" means mechanically. Is that an SLA? A p95? A median? I flagged that mentally and moved on. ## Where I paused The law firm example. Sarah, M&A, Texas territory, 22 minutes, deal moves forward. It's specific. It names a product page visited. It names the rep's calendar availability. That is the level of specificity that makes a use case feel real instead of aspirational. I slowed down here. I thought, okay, someone has thought through this workflow at the scenario level. ## What I distrusted The footer of the page hit me like a bucket of cold water. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet." I had to re-read that three times. I scrolled back up to the $49/month pricing table I had just read. Then I noticed the language underneath it: "We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." And then: "Adopt for $99." So I'm not buying a product. I'm being asked to buy the right to build a product. The pricing table I thought was for me, as a buyer, is actually aspirational pricing for a hypothetical SaaS that does not exist. The "real example" with Sarah is not a real customer story. It's a scenario someone wrote to illustrate what the product would do if it existed. That's a pretty significant framing problem. I read four paragraphs of feature copy as if this were a live product. The page uses product language throughout ("Router ingests signals," "Route to the highest-match salesperson"), and then at the very bottom discloses that this is a strategy package, not software. Also: "1 in 8 meaningful-success odds" and "$-50,000 year-1 take-home" are not numbers I expect to see on a product homepage. Those are numbers for the person building this, not for me. Why are they on my screen? ## What would convince me If this were a live product: a screenshot of the actual routing dashboard with a real company's data blurred out. Not a designed mockup. A Loom of someone actually configuring a routing rule for a law firm. One testimonial where the name and firm are real and searchable. If this is an idea-stage product looking for a builder: be upfront about that from line one. The current framing makes me feel like I was almost tricked. That's not a feeling that leads to trust. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The Sarah example is detailed enough that it reads like a real case. Is it? If so, can I talk to that firm? 2. How does "intent scoring" actually work when the signal is a website form submission? What data are you pulling besides company size and page visited? 3. I'm currently using LeanData for round-robin routing in Salesforce. Are you positioning against that, or is this meant for teams that haven't bought a routing tool yet? ## Verdict: dismissive Not because the problem framing is wrong. The problem is real and the Sarah walkthrough is one of the cleaner scenario illustrations I've read. But I came here looking for software to buy and I found a strategy dossier for $5. Those are completely different products for completely different buyers, and putting them on the same page without being upfront about it from the top wasted my commute and my trust. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-30. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*